On a Combinatorial Conjecture Concerning Disjoint Occurrences of Events

Abstract

Recently van den Berg and Kesten have obtained a correlation-like inequality for Bernoulli sequences. This inequality, which goes in the opposite direction of the FKG inequality, states that the probability that two monotone (i.e., increasing or decreasing) events "occur disjointly" is smaller than the product of the individual probabilities. They conjecture that the monotonicity condition is immaterial, i.e., that the inequality holds for all events. In the present paper we try to make clear the intuitive meaning of the conjecture and prove some nontrivial special cases, one of which, a pure correlation inequality, is an extension of Harris' FKG inequality.